CHOCOLAT MADAGASCAR | Single Origin Fine Dark Chocolate | 100% Cacao | 85 g

Product Information

On a hillside overlooking Lake Itasy, an hour's drive from the capital, a Greek entrepreneur called Christos Spiliopoulos persuades me that it will. A former manager with TAF, he was born in Madagascar and has spent much of his life there. 'My first objective now is coffee,' he says. 'My aim is to make the best in Madagascar and hopefully the world! It is an obsession.' By next year, the self-taught coffee grower hopes to have 200,000 plants producing first-class arabica - the gourmet's choice, already grown in Madagascar for the domestic market - from his estate in the mountains. There, he shows me various experiments, growing coffee in different habitats - in sunlight, in shade, among soya plants (good for nitrogen), under a ylang-ylang tree - to find out where it thrives. Under a shady pergola, he tends his 60,000 nursery saplings as if they are temperamental orchids. In our podcast, Beach also talks about the situation on the ground in Madagascar, where certain areas have suffered environmental disasters such as drought and flooding, leading to famine in a country that is one of the poorest in the world. The climate, soil, flora of the area, and agroforestry farming practices all contribute to its single-origin habitat – along with post-harvesting fermentation and drying process that are critical to the flavour development. Subsequent roasting, grinding, and conching shapes the fine flavour, aroma and mouthfeel experience of Madagascar chocolate. Pioneering the first fresh fine Malagasy chocolate exports in 2004 from Africa, Chocolat Madagascar became the export brand, adding much more value (Raisetrade) to the Malagasy’s least developed economy.

Private investments since 2005 with Malagasy company Chocolaterie Robert SA created Africa's first exports of world class Chocolate . Exporting world class Chocolat from the Madagascar origin creates a much greater economic benefit for the Malagasy people than just exporting cocoa only , raising the value at origin by many times, RaiseTrade. ORIGIN+. Working with Beyond Good, fair trade and Rainforest Alliance-certified Guittard Chocolate, and others, USAID is introducing agroforestry to 2,000 additional cacao and spice farmers in the dry southern part of Madagascar—the area of the country most damaged by more frequent cyclones and ongoing drought. The partnerships aim to protect forests by improving the livelihoods of the 75 percent of Malagasy who live below the poverty line. To survive, many have no choice but to illegally cut down trees and hunt lemurs for food. To find out more on MIA​, listen to our podcast interview with Brett – or visit the company at ISM​, Hall 4.2, Stand J050 April 23-25 at the Koelnmesse.​ We bounce down potholed roads in Madagascar on our way to a cacao plantation, passing women dressed in bright reds and yellows selling fruit and vegetables under grass huts. Small yards are covered in drying and fermenting cacao seeds on their way to becoming chocolate.

Each box carries the Fairtrade logo on the front, and text that describes each bar as using the finest single-origin cocoa beans. This raises the skills, the value and ultimately contributes to raising the wealth at origin, under the Raisetrade concept," he said.​ One of only a few chocolate makers in the world that makes chocolate at its source, Menakao proudly sources and crafts its chocolate on the island, using only local ingredients. Unfortunately, this is rare even for craft chocolate – it’s estimated that less than 5% of the world’s chocolate is produced in the same country the cocoa is grown. It is the skill of the origin farmer, fermenter, and chocolatier to bring the best sensorial experience from each seasonal nurtured harvest to the consumer -- Neil Kelsall, Marketing Director , Chocolat Madagascar​ The country’s slash-and-burn approach to farming is evident in an endless stretch of treeless rice patties; some cacao parcels where more progressive growing practices haven’t been introduced contain small trees bearing little fruit.

This massive island nation is one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet, but the country has lost 25 percent of its tree cover since 2000, primarily to firewood and charcoal production. Deforestation will also exacerbate erosion in the northern part of the country as climate change drives stronger cyclones and increasingly heavy rainfall. Caramel and butterscotch flavours lead in the tasting, with pronounced lactic notes too. The creamy-caramel-butter notes lead and continue right through into the aftertaste. It's here the flavour is augmented slightly by notes of vanilla and toffee. As you know, we issued a call for Fairtrade to consider this model as a standard certification. I will be pushing more behind the scenes, and we plan to make a submission to the FCIA Glossary to help solidify the broader meaning of the term for the industry. I’ll also be coordinating with industry players and will look to issue a group press release in the coming months​,” he informs ConfectioneryNews. Given the resurgence of cocoa's popularity, more chocolate brands are considering sustainable and ethical best practices. New efforts are under way, such as the Cocoa Accountability Map, Cocoa & Forests Initiative, and the International Accountability Framework . All of these organizations encourage the preservation of lemurs’ forest homes. We work closely to the cocoa producers in Madagascar, to avoid a purely commercial relationship with them. That’s why our beans are produced by the best planting cooperatives and plantation in the upper and lower Sambirano Valley.The higher income raises the standard of living of the farmers. The fine cocoa is then carefully prepared by fermenting and drying. Usually most cocoa is then exported to chocolate factories around the world where the beans are then turned into chocolate. However, in our case, the fresh cocoa stays in Madagascar to be crafted into fine chocolate at the Chocolaterie Robert factory. We want to export value added products, such as high quality cocoa, butter, powder, couverture chocolate, baking chocolate liqueur and bars, which are all made at origin​. Near Ambanja, where a rusting French colonial bridge spans the coffee-coloured waters of the Sambirano river, it is easy to let charity and sentiment cloud the Malagasy vision. On the exposed shingle riverbed, dozens of women pummel their clothes clean while a naked boy, aged about two, hurls himself repeatedly into the shallows on his belly - joyful, innocent, a poignant reminder of how the simple accident of geography and birth can blight a child's future. As we roll into Ambanja (the end of a journey by Piper Cherokee plane, water taxi and Jeep), there are more ghosts from the colonial past - the Brigade Gendarmerie National, the pastel-pink Ecole Primaire Française d'Ambanja - along the dusty main drag of Madagascar's cocoa capital. In a quiet side street, the whitewashed offices of Ramanandraibe Exportation (Ramex) mark the spot where the Malagasy venture begins. Though Odilon's wife (who normally assists him) is at the coast, buying fish, the rest of his family are here: Alain Bruno, 18; Charlisa and Friejla, both 14; Andriamisy Francisco, 13; and Jucardo, six. Though they go to school, they help their parents at weekends, learning the business of cocoa preparation. 'I would like all my sons to be preparateurs,' Odilon says, 'because they can earn good money.' Dried and treated beans sell for three times as much as the fresh product - in Neil Kelsall's terms, a way of achieving 'added value' at the earliest possible stage. Consumers are more mindful and inquisitive about what they eat ... with the health impacts, environmental, ethical and economic considerations, Kelsall says. Fine chocolate

What makes Madagascar unique is that it produces rare cacao that has aromatic forest fruit and citrus flavors, a wonderful foundation for fine chocolate, said Neil Kelsall, marketing director at Chocolat Madagascar, when we met earlier in the year at ISM/Prosweets 2019. MIA’s mission is to reset what it claims is an unfair balance in global cocoa production with 70% of the crop grown in Africa, but only 1% of the chocolate made on the continent. By making chocolate from bean-to-bar in Africa, MIA says it creates much more value than the export of raw cocoa beans and supports the creation of skilled jobs locally from chocolate making to printing ... to the service industry – on a continent where a single income can support an entire family. Known primarily as an exotic hideaway off the east coast of Africa, and home to unique species of plants and fauna, chameleons and lemurs, Madagascar harbors another secret: its single origin cocoa.

Chocolate sustainability

As well as a successful business producing premium chocolate bars, MIA is also one of the companies at the forefront of efforts pushing for change in the cocoa sector, by basically either paying farmers more for their beans - and in MIA’s case bringing a value-added share of a chocolate bar, by keeping production in the origin country. Ambanja, MadagascarSome of the best cocoa on Earth is produced in Madagascar, where an updated approach to farming cacao, the main ingredient in the world’s favorite sweet, is offering benefits for the country's unique ecosystem. But it is growing, he says, partly because of its quality, and partly because of greater consumer awareness of what single-origin chocolate means. The aroma servers up notes of plums and jam, with just a whiff of smoke and hay. So far, so promising.

Unusually, each of the boxes opens up at the front like a book, revealing a bar clad in golden-coloured paper decorated with the J.D. Gross branding.All three bars come sealed inside a brightly coloured cardboard box. Each features a gold-foiled J.D. Gross logo and the cocoa origin information is similarly styled. HB Ingredients, the UK’s largest independent chocolate distributor, started distributing Chocolat Madagascar couverture in 2013. The Madagascan products complement their single-origin couverture range, which also includes chocolate from Colombia and Grenada. A number of chocolate producers are getting on the sustainability bandwagon. Beyond Good organic chocolate company works directly with 150 Malagasy cacao farmers to bring them up to date on the most progressive agroforestry practices, from tree selection for shade and soil health to species diversity that helps maximize the survival of the island’s threatened lemurs. Madagascar’s ring-tailed lemur population has plummeted at least 95 percent since 2000. There is no need to add other flavors such as vanilla and more sugar, or chemicals (alkalise), which is a very common solution with the less palatable mainstream bitter cacao commodity​.” The new idea of single-origin chocolate means that all the ingredients in the couverture (the wholesale/bulk cocoa used by chefs, chocolatiers etc) must come from the same country and be processed locally.